BIDPAI, bid'pl, or PILPAI. When we consider the wonderful history of 'Bidpars Fables,' their fame and their charm, we nat urally mvest their supposititious author with a personality. and a name. In fact, however, nBidpai* is probably a changed form of an Indian word for ucourt-scholar,p misunder stood as a proper name, and implying there fore neither personality nor specific date. In India from early times the parable or ((ex ample) has been the recognized method of conveying moral instruction. In the didactic literature, some general truth or some rule of life is stated in the form of a maxim, and a beast fable or other story then added as a con crete instance or "example?' The folk-lore of which these tales are a reflex is not the exclu sive property of any of the great religions of ancient India, but is common to Buddhism, Jainism and Brahmanism alike, The sculp tured representations of the stories upon the great Buddhist monuments of 250 ac. make it certain that the stories themselves were famil iar to the common people at that early date; and it is hardly less certain that they were so known long before that time. The oldest and most important collection of Indian folk-lore is the Buddhist one called (Jatak0— that is, 'Birth-stories,' or stories of Gautaina Buddha in his previous births: it consists of 550 tales, each containing a moral; each is placed in the mouth of the Buddha, and in eac,h the Buddha plays the best and most important part. It is this device of a framework or setting for the folk-tales that constitutes the principal essen tially literary element of the collection. Next in importance to the Buddhist (Jataka) stands the Brahrnanical (Panchatantra.) Here the material is not essentially different in kind from that of the (Jatalca.); but again it is the setting of the matenal which gives the work its dis tinctive literary character. It is a kind of 'Mirror for Magistrates.' Both the (jatalca? written in Pali, and the 'Panchatantra,) in Sanslcrit, are still extant, and contain many of the stories which in translations of transla tions attained great currency and celebrity in znediieval literature.
The precise Indian original of these transla tions is lost; but we know that it was trans lated into the literary language of Persia (the PehleVi, or Pahleir), by command of the Sas sanian King, Khosru the Just, about 550 A.D. From the Pehlevi came two notable versions: one the Old Syriac, called (Kalilag and Dam nag,' after the two jackals, Karataka and Damanalca, who figured prominently in the framework of the Sanskrit original; and the other the Arabic version, called (Kalilah and Dimnah,) or 'Fables of Bidpai,) made about 750 A.D. by Abd-allah ibn al-bloqaffa, a Persian convert to Islam under the Caliph al-Mansor. According to the Arabic introduc tion, Dabshelim was the first king of the Indian Restoration, after the fall of the gover nor appointed by Alexander at the close of his campaign in the Punjab, 326 s.c. When firmly established, Dabshelim gave himself over to every wickedness. To reclaim the King, a Brahman philosopher takes up his parable, as did Nathan before David, and at last wins him back to virtue. The wise man is called in Arabic bid-bah, and in Syriac bid-vag. These words are traced through the Pehlevi to the Sanskrit vidya-pati, "master of sciences." Ac cordingly bid-bah, which has become Bidpai or Pilpai in our modern books, is not really a proper name, but an appellative, applied to a "chief pandit" or "court-scholar° of an Indian prince.
From the Arabic are descended, in the fourth generation from the original, a dozen or more versions, of which three may be men tioned as noteworthy links in the chain of tradition: the Greek one, made about 1080 by Symeon Seth, a Jewish physician; the Persian, made some 50 years later, by Nasr Allah of Ghazni; and the Hebrew, ascribed to Rabbi Joel, and probably made before 1250. Of the
descendants in -the fifth degree from the origi nal, the• Wirectorium Humane Vita,' made about 1270 by John of Capua from the Hebrew, is distinctly the most celebrated, because it gave rise in turn to Danish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and French, and above all to the famous German and English versions men tioned below. But besides the 'Directorium,) we must notice the 'Specimen of the Wisdom of the Ancient Hindus,' a version into Latin from the Greek Symeon, made by the Jesuit father, Petrus Possinus (1666); • and the 'Anvir-i Suhaili) or